Apache Tiles

An efficient design consideration for any web application is the use of a template engine (or tool), and with Spring’s “pluggable” nature, it is indeed much more easier to integrate template mechanisms such as Apache Tiles.

In this simple post, I will give you a brief intro and basics of using Tiles as a Template engine for your Web Application! 🙂

Get it Ready: Web Application Setup

Setup Maven and Import the Spring-MVC libraires plus the Apache Tiles

Configuration File

Tiles

Use it!

1st: Web Layout and Application Setup: Get your Web Application Framework ready. For this example, I used Spring 3 MVC with all the minimal components readily injected. Download it here. The project is eclipse ready, so you can just import and load it on your STS (Spring Tool Suite) workspace.

2nd: Setup Maven and generate sources – STS already has a Maven Plugin support. Put a Maven nature first on the project by right clicking on > project > configure > Convert to Maven project.

3rd: POM Configuration – Load the Tiles on the pom.xml. – You need to include the following dependencies to add Apache Tiles libraries to the project.

With the quality and quantity of application development tools, using templates is not new. Creation of these are now strictly mandatory as it will really help the development team to create quality UI faster and better. It also allows developers and designers to work in parallel. Designers using a themeing API, let say JQuery and developers creating the backbone and logic of the application – using EJBs, makes the definition of “ease of development” more apparent.

Download my sample and open it in your STS (Spring Tool Suite) here. Make sure you have the Hibernate and Maven Plugin installed.